Nick Valensi Says the Strokes Are Working on a New Album

Back in May, the Strokes released the Future Present Past EP. Now, guitarist Nick Valensi has said that the group have begun working on material for their sixth full-length record.

“We are slowly but surely working on an album,” he told DIY. “I don’t know when it’s going to be released, we’re kind of just in writing sessions. We’re writing. I’m actually in New York at the moment, at a studio in New York for that.”

Whenever it is ready, it will be the first album for the Strokes since 2013's Comedown Machine, which reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200, the lowest placement for a Strokes record since their platinum-selling 2001 debut, Is This It, stalled at No. 33.

DIY reports that Valensi also has a side project called CRX that is preparing to release its first effort, New Skin, this month. This will make him the last member of the Strokes to have released something outside of the band, either as a solo album or under the name of another group. Last month, Nikolai Fraiture, the bassist, announced that he was starting up Summer Moon, whose members include Jane's Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins.

Future Present Past only contained three songs and a remix by drummer Fab Moretti of another of its tracks, "Oblivius." While they produced videos for "Threat of Joy" and "Drag Queen," they ran into a bit of a snag while making one for "Oblivius." The clip, according to frontman Julian Casablancas, “had all this political content, and through different indirect corridors it got shut down."